Redact “slander.” Insert “rhetoric.”
Go and sin no more.
You know, december, if I recall, you are an actuary? Is that correct?
If it is, then you are basing this trivial thread on too little data. You certainly wouldn’t rate an insurance policy on a customer based on such a trivial amount of data.
Come back in 50 years, and tell me that the Democrats are forming a pattern, but the Republicans aren’t.
You obviously have too little data to draw such a conslusion, except as it applies to this one-shot limited example.
minty, I’ll accept “mean-spirited, nasty rhetoric” in place of “slander.”
samclem, I’m glad you asked that question, because I neglected to make the other half of my argument.
IIRC Ashcroft’s nasty comment about White was pretty much one man speaking. I don’t recall anyone else calling White “pro-criminal.”
OTOH there were organized campaigns to attack Pickering, Bork, and Thomas. (Not so much with Owen and Ginsburg.) The Democrats and their willing accomplices in the press hit these 3 guys with everything they had in a coordinaqted way. So, corresponding to these 3 judges who suffered mean-spirited rhetorical attacks, there were perhaps 2 or 3 dozen Senators who conspired to commit the infractions. In addition, there were a number of press accomplices.
So, the difference is a lot more than 5 to 1. It’s more like 30 to 1.
Pickering had an explicitly racist past.
Bork’s express position on issue after issue was a threat to basic American liberties. (Remember his famous claim that the First Amendment only applies to political speech, and maybe also scientific speech?)
Thomas was flatly unqualified, with no more than a couple years of judicial experience.
Combine those detestable “qualities” with far-right wing politics and you have lightning rods for energetic political opposition. And it happens to Democrats too. Remember Lani Guinier?
Since the New York Times and the Washington Post have both editorialized that he was not any sort of racist, and WaPo even praised him for his courageous efforts against the Klan, this dog won’t hunt.
Bork explored a lot of legal ideas as a Professor. That’s a professor’s job. However, as a judge he had been legally scrupulous with his decisions. It might have been reasonable for the Judiciary Committee hearings to explore the difference between his philosophy on the bench and the ideas he had written about as a professor, but that’s not what that circus did.
I remember those hearings, with Senator Kennedy oleogenusly pretending that Bork’s decisions on the* law* automatically meant that Bork agreed with that position as a policy. I remember a number of vicious Senatorial “questionings” attacks where a response wasn’t even permitted. Those hearings were conducted in the style of Tail Gunner Joe. They were an effort to destroy Bork’s reputation, and they succeeded.
minty mentioned “basic American liberties.” I think it violates basic American liberties when the Senate uses its Advise and Consent power to destroy someone’s reputation – even to the extent of checking his garbage and his video-tape rental record.
And, it’s ironic for Democrat Senators who mostly favor Campaign Finance Reform to complain about restricting the 1st Amendment to political freedom of speech. Their actions say that they don’t even think it goes that far. CFR, as passed, sets up a government body to review political speech and decide whether it’s permitted or not. Ugh!
Thomas opponent, former Democratic Solicitor General Drew Days, said Thomas was qualified. Since Days was one of the leading Democratic lawyers, and Days had also attended Yale Law School, one would presume that Days was quite familiar with Thomas’s record. Days’s endorsement of Thomas’s qualification (even though opposing him on philosophical grounds) disproves the claim that Thomas was flatly unqualified.
Rather, combine perceived weaknesses with anti-abortion positions and you have ammunition that can be used to demonize someone. It’s striking that even after the two top liberal newspapers in the country have apologized for the racialist attack on Pickering, minty green is still holding on to that position. Those unfair attacks stuck.
A more accurate way to describe these battles is that the Democrats seized on any perceived weakness or blemish and used it to attack the nominee unmercifully. For those of us who believe in the value of free and open speech, it’s upsetting to have a situation where a potential appointee must watch her exact words during her entire career, because if she’s nominated, something she wrote or said 40 years ago can be taken out of context and used to destroy her reputation.
She wasn’t nominated to be a judge. We were spcifically addressing judicial nominees in this thread. If you’d like to broaden it to allnoominees, I could go back and find a great many examples. We could start with John Tower in 1989, who got a raw deal, according to even liberal WaPo. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/frenzy/tower.htm
Incidentally the most famous of the demonnized Clinton cabinet nominees might be Zoe Baird. But, that attack came from the Naderites on the far left, not from the Republicans.
Returning to the OP for a moment; this article appears to show that Senator Leahy does have a sense of decency:
Report on coca spraying in Colombia criticized
Maybe the lack is on the other side of the ideological divide ?
I think, seeing as what happened to Bork after he got turned down, we should all be happy he never made it. He really showed his true, zany colors afterwards, when he didn’t have to hide them any longer.
elucidator, IIRC the judge you asked about earlier is Edith Jones, supposedly on the short list of Bush’s possible US Supreme Court nominees.
Yes, Edith Jones is the member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit who wrote the majority opinion for the initial panel of three judges (with one dissent) affirming the conviction and death sentence of the guy whose lawyer repeatedly slept through portions of the trial. According to Jones, the defendant could not show the requisite harm in his ineffective because the record did not reveal which portions of the trial the lawyer had slept through, and they might not have been important moments.
It was an execrable opinion, and it was, thank god, resoundingly reversed when the entire court reconsidered the en banc.
. . . requisite harm in his ineffective assistance of counsel claim because . . .
Ah yes. Those pesky Dems. Cause, y’know, the Republicans stoop to this much less often. And it’s not like they do it to members of their own party.
Granted, this site is on the whacko end of the opposition–and not from the people actually involved–but the point is the same. His own party did him in for not falling in line, called him soft-on-drugs, etc.
Yes, what Jesse Helms did to Governor Weld was appalling and disgusting.
I would agree that the typical Democratic Senator stoops no lower than the whacko end of the Republican Party. 
**december: ** “I agree that Republicans do not have clean hands. But, this sort of demonization is now more typical of Democrats.”
and
“Republican slander was an exception; the Democratic slander is a pattern.”
I know this is true, because Ann Coulter says so. She also has redefined “slander” such that it only applies to those she accuses of committing it and not to herself. Note, this comment is more about Coulter than about december.
Oh, now I understand the nonsensical fixation on “slander.” Ann Coulter said it, so it must be true.
december…very nice post. I agree with some of your points, but can’t agree that Owen would make a good choice. After all, surely there are more fair-minded choices even among conservatives. Her credentials aren’t so stellar that her questionable decisions ought to be overlooked.
Here’s a great article from the Nation regarding her nomination:
december,
I don’t think your argument is as weak as you’ve made it out to be.
Clearly a good deal of partisanship and special-interest-placating goes into this process of judicial confirmation. Both sides practice it; no one wants to moderate it. I would guess that Judge Owen is neither much worse, nor much better, than the typical court nominee…which is not necessarily a compliment. To the extent that the Committee was suddenly “raising the bar” on her, that was unfair, and you are right to disapprove.
However, that’s not precisely what you’ve been saying. At least, it’s not the main thrust of it.
You believe the following is slander on the order of that used by McCarthy: “…her extremism even in the conservative region of the Supreme Court of Texas…” It’s not a friendly remark, granted; whether it is true is arguable. But it’s not a particularly pugnacious dig at her personal ethics and morality. She’s not being called a traitor, drug smuggler, or murderer (to use some terms flung by GOP leaders and enablers in the direction of our recent President of the United States). You may know that the Republican presidential candidate provided a context for “good” extremism in 1964–it was a campaign slogan ("–in the defense of liberty is no vice…"). And Mr. Goldwater reiterated it before the National Convention not many years ago, without censure.
If I were pro-life, I would tend to approve of someone characterized as displaying “extremism in advancing the pro-life agenda.” If I were pro-vegetarianism–likewise. It’s only slander to someone who thinks the general view is immoral/unethical at its root; I hardly think Judge Owen regards either judicial or social conservatism in that light.
So: no slander.
That’s well argued Scott. If “slander” is an overstatement, “not a friendly remark” is an understatement.
Your point about Goldwater is as good one, but after he got creamed no other candidate ever defended “extremism.” So, the statute of limitations has run on that argument. In addition, Owen doesn’t use that term in describing herself, as Goldwater foolishly did.
You are right that Clinton was called far worse things than Owen. So was W (alias the idiot)for that matter. Still, we have not traditionally treated our judges like politicians.
Regardless of how one characterizes the remark, how does it compare to McCarthy’s type of remarks? Well, he called Alger Hiss a “Communist sympathizer” for example. In fact, Hiss was actually a secret Communist, but his actions demonstrated that he was at least a sympathizer. He used that epithet, sometimes shortened to “Comsymp” on many others as well. Most of them were sympathetic to Communism.
The Pickering was utterly backwards, which in that sense made it worse than McCarthy. He was implicitly called a racist, when he had actually taken many steps to fight the KKK and to promote racial harmony.
musteion, I subscribed to the Nation in my student days. After reading it carefully for a year, I lost respect for it. The last straw was an article i know a lot about, criticizing life insuracne companies for how they made rates. I also disapproved of many things these companies did, but the article got everything wrong. It purported to be giving the inside scoop, but it was written by an ignoramus. The insight hit me: Why should I believe their articles about other subjects where they purport to give the inside scoop?
I found your cited article full of ad hominem attacks, but not so much evidence of their accuracy. It goes without saying that they left out anything positive, such as graduating first in her class, her unanimous well-qualified rating from the ABA, her endorsement by dozens and dozens of Texas newspapers. Here are a few of the slurs: **record of extreme right-wing judicial activism… right-wing radical…a Karl Rove special… Rove, the political Svengali…
Context is everything. She was first in her class at Baylor.
Here’s the full version of the last half.
musteion, I subscribed to the Nation in my student days. After reading it carefully for a year, I lost respect for the magazine. The last straw was an article about life insurance, which I happened to know a lot about. The article criticized how life insurance companies made rates. In fact, I actually disapproved of many things these companies did. I was a good liberal. However, the Nation article got it all wrong. It purported to give the inside scoop, but it was written by an ignoramus. However, it could have been persuasive to someone who hadn’t worked in the field of insurance rate-making.
Then an insight hit me: Why should I believe their other wise-sounding articles – articles about subjects that I knew nothing about? I coundn’t find an answer. Once I lost faith, there was nothing left.
Your cited article has a lot more ad hominem attacks than evidence. It goes without saying that they left out anything positive, such as graduating first in her class, her unanimous well-qualified rating from the liberal ABA, and her endorsement by dozens and dozens of Texas newspapers. Here are a few of the slurs: **record of extreme right-wing judicial activism… right-wing radical…a Karl Rove special… Rove, the political Svengali… hired gun…a political pawn…pack the courts …a favor to the right wing because she is the darling of the right wing…Satisfying the far right–especially the fundamentalist right…exemplifies the most extreme hostility to reproductive rights of any of the nominees…part of a militant minority **
The article has few facts to support this purple prose. The one strong fact is that Gonzalez strongly disagreed with her decision on a particular case involving parental notification. Beyond that, the article’s support is mostly quoting her political opponents. They had strong negative things to say about her. :smack:
Hey, you got your irony in my peanut butter!